Online Infidelity: It's Facebook Official

Texas Tech research finds online acts of infidelity are often no less severe than
acts committed in-person.

The reality of online infidelity.

Thanks to a new study by Texas Tech University researchers, treating infidelity among
couples may change due to the unique aspect of social networking sites, specifically
Facebook.

Using data from Facebookcheating.com, researchers found that although the stages of coping with online infidelity are
unique, the infidelity itself creates similar emotional experiences for the partner
who was cheated on.

“This is very important because there is a line of thought that if the infidelity
was discovered online, or confined to online activity, then it shouldn’t be as painful,”
said Jaclyn Cravens, a doctoral candidate in the Marriage & Family Therapy Program and lead author of the study.

During her master’s program clinical work, Cravens discovered many of her clients’
relationship issues stemmed from online infidelity thanks to an increasing number
of people using social media sites, especially Facebook.

Whiting and Cravens.

“Facebook already has changed the dynamics of relationships,” Cravens said. “We see
when our ‘friends’ are getting into a relationship. We say a relationship isn’t ‘official’
until it’s ‘Facebook-official.’”

She found that many of her clients had discovered instances of their partner exchanging
suggestive messages with a third party on the social networking site, even though
the two were supposedly in a monogamous relationship.

Cravens found that outside of issues like porn addiction, there hadn’t yet been much
research to back treatment for these kinds of relationship problems confined to the
Internet.

Surprised at the lack of information about a topic so pervasive in society—Facebook
had more than 1 billion users as of March 2013—Cravens decided to pursue the topic
for a qualitative methods course project, along with the help of Kaitlin Leckie, who
also is a graduate student in the Marriage & Family Therapy Program and Jason Whiting, an associate professor in the program.

“We used Facebookcheating.com to determine the coping process for people who have
discovered a partner’s infidelity on Facebook,” Cravens said. “We discovered several
main themes and were able to create a process model that moves through different stages
of the ways people deal with the information.”

The model includes the following five stages:

Warning signs: the partner who was cheated on notices gut feelings and/or suspicious behavior on
the internet, such as minimizing windows, habitually clearing out browser history
and adding passwords.

Discovering infidelity: the individual either takes it upon themselves to investigate the warning signs,
or the individual accidentally discovers the infidelity.

Damage appraisal: the individual determines whether the discovered acts was or was not a violation
of the relationship.

Acting on appraisal: If the individual determines that the act or acts were a violation of the relationship,
he or she either confronts or avoids the partner. Sometimes the individual decides
that the evidence wasn’t concrete enough to be able to approach partner. Others retaliate,
which typically includes posting messages online or sending a message to the third
party, or the third party’s partner.

Making a relationship decision: based on how the individual decided to act, they tend to make a decision about the
relationship. Some end the relationship because trust was violated, others use monitoring
behaviors to ensure it doesn’t happen again, and some are uncertain about what next
step should be.

“For many couples, step three can be very difficult because couples often don’t have
clearly established rules about online behavior,” Cravens said. “They aren’t totally
sure whether or not something can count as cheating.”

Regardless, Cravens said the emotional impact for the party who has discovered online
acts of infidelity is no less severe than acts committed in-person.

“People have ability to be more vulnerable online, which facilitates a greater emotional
response,” Cravens said. “This can be just as devastating if not more devastating
than an offline response.”

For a clinical setting, Cravens explained that the research can help counselors treat
marital problems that have root causes in online infidelity.

“It’s important from our perspective to be able to find out what has been violated,”
Cravens said. “We need to be able to recognize the emotional experience and process
emotions for both partners.”

Cravens currently is a visiting lecturer at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas.
Her research was published in “Contemporary Family Therapy.”